Monthly Archives: April 2016

Grab your headphones and prepare to be entranced by Slow Wave, a 3-minute experimental animation about sleep disturbances and its effect on the mind and body. Creator, Andy Kennedy constructs an entirely visceral experience of slumber with his atmospheric sound design and disorienting animation style. Immediately, you’re thrust into a small bedroom at nighttime. At what appears to be car headlights passing along the far wall, sound pans across, creating a realistic sensory experience. From that moment on, the bedroom begins to collapse and roll like a ship over waves that get progressively more rough.

The killer read his Bible. He drank. Heavily. It was a fall night in 2006, when Bradley Waldroup walked out of his rural trailer in southeastern Tennessee, carrying his .22 caliber hunting rifle. His estranged wife and her friend, Leslie Bradshaw, had just pulled up to drop off the Waldroups’ four children. Waldroup began arguing with his wife and Bradshaw, who was unloading the car. Drawing his gun, Waldroup shot Bradshaw eight times, killing her. He used a knife to cut her head open.

As far back as the ancient Greeks, people have documented a funny phenomenon among pregnant women: The skin on their faces sometimes changes color. Scientists never quite knew why that happened, though they suspected that it was linked to the spike in the body’s hormones during pregnancy. Now, a new study published this week in eLife found that two sex hormones, estrogen and progesterone, play a key role in regulating the body’s synthesis of melanin, the substance that gives skin pigment.

When a pigeon flies, you can hear it sloppily slap its wings as it makes its way through the air. When a peregrine falcon flies, the flight is powerful and beautiful but you can still hear the movement. When a barn owl flies? Complete silence. It’s amazing to see. BBC Earth set up microphones along the flight path of the birds to let us hear the difference.